In general, conventional hard disk drives are the primary source of non-volatile storage in a variety of computerized systems and settings. Such computerized environments include laptop computers, desktop computers, data storage arrays, enterprise-style data storage systems, storage area networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), among others.
One conventional hard disk drive includes a control circuit, a motor and magnetic platters. The control circuit signals the motor to spin up the magnetic platters from a stationary (i.e., non-moving) position to a full operating speed. Then, while the magnetic platters spin at the full operating speed, the control circuit carries out load and store operations whereby heads of the control circuit read data from and write data to the spinning magnetic platters.
Some hard disk drives, such as those of a data storage system, are designed to rotate constantly at a very high speed (e.g., 10,000 RPM). These hard disk drives are designed to provide extremely fast average response times due, at least in part, to their extremely fast platter speeds. Additionally, these hard disk drives are designed to run at the full operating speed essentially all the time and to stop only occasionally, e.g., when the data storage system as a whole is shutdown for maintenance or repair.